"History is on our side." It probably is, and that is why you are doomed to lose.

The people who say that history is on their side are the people who look back to the recent past and see a direction in it. That is why they are bound to lose: because the future is practically never like the past. It changes, and changes exactly at the point when a tendency has reached its peak and seems established as a law of history - because when a tendency has reached its peak, it has peaked. Example: Hitler grew up in a world where Germany was growing economically and politically stronger and stronger, till by 1914 she was effectively the strongest power in the world, strong enough to launch that bid for world domination that became known as World War One. (Very simplified version of what happened - but that is what happened.) Hitler could not imagine a world where German power would not go on growing above all others, as he had seen it in his childhood and adolescence, and so he went into another World War, without being able to get his head around the fact that in the intervening years America and Russia had grown way beyond Germany's potential. Come the war, America and Russia ate Germany and burped. Likewise, Lenin grew in a period when the Socialist movement was growing riotously all over Europe, from about 1890 to about 1910, when most European countires had a Socialist plurality among their electorates and in their parliaments. Convinced that socialism was the wave of the future because it was the wave of his own recent past, Lenin brutally imposed his own tyrannical version of it on Russia - but Socialism was in fact peaking across the West. It would never achieve more than a plurality in any election, and never, in spite of its claim to represent "the people", represent more than an important section of it. And on this partial and mistaken claim Lenin and his followers built their demand for absolute power. Indeed, by introducing into the unstable Socialist movement the acidic element of his own centralized and aggressive movement, and by associating it with tyranny and unreason, Lenin may actually have sped up its decline. People can't see the future, only the recent past, and the very fact that they declare that history is on their side proves it beyond any doubt - for history is the record of the past.